A prepper mindset of situational awareness not only encompasses your immediate surroundings, but extends outward beyond your visual perimeter – or at least it should. A police scanner is one source tool for situational awareness which may be of value during certain emergency situations.

There are ‘hardware’ scanners and there are online scanners (software), the latter of which are convenient and often ‘free’ services which you can run on your PC or your smart-phone as an app. Here are a few online scanner choices which I’ve come across…